FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT RACE WAR - PAGE 4

As World War I drew to a close in late 1918, the noted black author and activist James Weldon Johnson posed the issue that was on the minds of many African-Americans: Would their support for the war effort, on the battlefields of Europe and in the factories of the United States, translate into improvements in the "status of the Negro as an American citizen?" At that historical moment, blacks' status could be described as second-class — or worse. Their bill of complaints was painfully long: They were denied the vote in the South, trapped in a system of sharecropping that precluded economic mobility, excluded from countless workplaces, denigrated as biologically and culturally inferior, subject to harassment and violence, and relegated to segregated facilities that were palpably inferior to those of their white counterparts.

In pondering Howard Reich's article on the race war in jazz (Oct. 30, The Arts), it occurred to me that the Board of Directors of Moline's Louie Bellson Jazz Fest is made up of people whose ancestry can be traced to Austria, Ireland, Mexico, Sweden and Africa. Notwithstanding what's going on in New York, the Quad Cities are truly a melting pot of jazz, and we're proud of it.

The Pentagon is beefing up its public-relations staff and starting an operation akin to a political campaign's war room. In a memo obtained by The Associated Press, Dorrance Smith, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, said new teams of people will "develop messages" for the 24-hour news cycle and "correct the record." The memo describes an operation modeled after a political campaign--such as that made famous by Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential race war room--calling for a "Rapid Response" section that quickly answers opponents' assertions.

The race to war in Iraq will not solve the problems we face in the Middle East and will only hurt our national security. Thousands of innocent lives will also be lost if this war begins. We all have a responsibility to speak out in favor of a peaceful solution to this crisis.

I`m as horrified as anyone else by the atrocities committed by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, but I think the less we say about that the better. Don`t forget, we are the ones who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Remember My Lai also, before saying that Iraqis do not belong to the human race. War dehumanizes the participants on both sides. One of the ugliest TV pictures of this war was that of young U.S. airmen returning from a bombing raid, exhilarated, thrilled, with expressions of unrestrained joy on their faces.

By Brendan O'Brien OAK CREEK, Wis., Aug 12 (Reuters) - Hundreds of people gathered on Sunday at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin for the first public service there since a white supremacist gunned down six people at the temple exactly a week earlier. They prepared and ate a traditional meal and raised the Nashan Sahib, the Sikh flag, before the prayer service on the same grounds where Wade Michael Page, 40, went on a shooting rampage last Sunday and then killed himself.

On July 15, 1606, painter Rembrandt van Rijn was born in Leiden, Netherlands. In 1850 Mother Francis Xavier Cabrini, the first American citizen to be canonized, was born near Lodi, Italy. In 1912 Jim Thorpe led the U.S. team as it won the most medals at the Olympic Games in Stockholm. In 1933 a group of 24 seaplanes, led by Italy's air minister, landed on Lake Michigan near Navy Pier for the Century of Progress exposition. In 1940 a betatron built at the University of Illinois in Urbana was placed into operation.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Charles Herman Older had been on the bench only a few years when the trial of mass murderer Charles Manson landed in his courtroom. By the time the 10-month trial ended, he was a veteran. In the early 1970s the case was as bizarre as anything the city had seen until then: Manson and his LSD-dropping followers--mostly young women--told of committing gruesome murders in the name of starting a race war, showed up in court with shaved heads and Xs on their foreheads, and sometimes chanted nonsensically, in keeping with what Judge Older would call Manson's "twisted philosophy."

On July 15, 1099, the First Crusade ended with the capture of Jerusalem and the crowning of Godfrey of Bouillon as king. In 1606 painter Rembrandt van Rijn was born in Leiden, Netherlands. In 1850 Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first American citizen to be canonized, was born near Lodi, Italy. In 1870 Georgia became the last of the Confederate states to be readmitted to the Union. In 1916 Pacific Aero Products, later to evolve into Boeing Co., was founded in Seattle.